A team of Foundation scientists joined with European astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch to publish last week in Science magazine an eLetter that corrected, at last, a 49 year old mistake published in Science by Klaus Biemann and his coworkers. The eLetter is appended to the bottom of the Biemann et al. abstract. This mistake published in Science caused multiple generations of astrobiologists to believe incorrectly that the Martian soil contained no organic molecules. This evolved into the view that the Martian soil is "self-sterilizing" because it contained a powerful "mystery" oxidant, and therefore could not possibly hold extant Martian life. Read more.

Dr. Steven Benner was interviewed for Event Horizon, with topics covering the recent reevaluation of the last year discovery of "leopard spots" and "poppy seeds" (vivianite) in rock on Mars, Viking missions, and life on Mars in general.

Watch the H2M2 2025 panel, Innovating Sustainability on Mars - Improving Life on Earth, as experts explore how emerging technologies for Mars exploration can help address pressing challenges on Earth. Dr. Steven Benner joined the discussion as a featured panelist.

Dr. Jan Špaček will give a talk, titled Hunting aliens: Venus is interesting, Mars is urgent, at Breakthrough Discuss at the University of Oxford on April 24th, 2025.

The Foundation was listed in the 2024 annual NASA Spinoff publication which highlights the benefits of NASA research and development of cutting edge technologies

Steven Benner was featured on "Special Report" as Bret Baier reports on NASA's plans to begin searching for life on other planets.

Dr. Jan Špaček discussed how to search for extant life on Mars and why is it important to do it before we send humans there on the Red Planet Live podcast.

A Space.com article exploring the quest for life on Mars and the challenges of sample-return mission spotlights the groundbreaking efforts led by Foundation researchers Steven Benner and Jan Špaček at FfAME and the Agnostic Life Finding Association (ALFA).

The Department of Chemistry of the University of Basel and the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation annouced Dr. Steven Benner as lecturer for the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Lectures 2023. The Lectureship annually hosts a prominent U.S. chemist at the Basel campus for talks and discussions with faculty and students, fostering collaboration between Swiss and U.S. science.

Steven Benner discussed FfAME's work in synthetic biology and Hachimoji DNA with Tim Ventura on his program, Tim Ventura Interviews.

FfAME researcher Elisa Biondi's work is cited in an article on RNA and the origin of life (Full article: Nature)

Elisa Biondi explained her new results solving one of the most difficult problems in the origins of life to Italian Broadcasting this week.